The potential for such a Congress-made calamity has provoked a sense of doom not only in Washington, DC, but also in financial markets where there is a pervasive fear that a fall off the cliff will create an immediate economic crisis. Practically everyone in Washington, from President Obama to House Speaker John Boehner, has expressed confidence that a deal can be reached by the end of the year to prevent this from happening.

Allow me to offer an alternative take: not only will a major deal not be reached by the end of the year, but one shouldn't be reached. For purely political reasons, both Democrats and Republicans have everything to gain by letting the United States fall off the cliff – and then pick up the pieces after 1 January.

Now, it's important to remember that all this discussion about a fiscal cliff is a bit of a misnomer – a cliff suggests a precipitous fall to a likely demise. But in reality, this cliff is more of a slope, or a slow but steady decline, down the road of fiscal austerity. Yes, tax and spending policies will shift after 1 January: taxes will go up and spending cuts mandated by law will begin to go in effect. But these are changes that will unfold over many months, and even years. Indeed, the immediate impact of the "fiscal cliff" will be relatively minor. As the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities noted recently:

"A relatively brief implementation of the tax and spending changes required by current law should cause little short-term damage to the economy as a whole."

This isn't to say that markets won't have a collective freakout or that confidence in Congress to actually do its job will decline further, but those are manageable issues, particularly because, once Washington goes over the cliff, it becomes much easier to quickly reach a deal between Republicans and Democrats.

The reason has everything to do with the Republican party and it's party-wide allergy to any proposal that would raise taxes. While there are serious issues that need to be debated in fiscal cliff talks, the political heart of the matter is the full expiration of the Bush tax cuts at the end of the year – and President Obama's insistence that tax rates must go up on wealthier Americans and must stay where they are on those making less than $250,000. For a deal to be reached before 1 January, Republicans would have to do one of two things: first, they'd have to agree to a compromise that would have them voting for tax increases on wealthy Americans; or, second, they would have to find enough revenue elsewhere in the tax code to make up the difference that higher tax rates would bring in.

There is no reason to doubt him. For all the recent declarations of independence from Republicans on the tax issue, in the end, the vast majority will never vote for a tax increase, under any conditions.

So, what about raising revenue elsewhere? This is not impossible, but will be extraordinarily difficult to achieve. Not only will Republicans have to identify various deductions and loopholes to close in the tax code by 1 January, but they will also need to craft a plan that is agreeable to President Obama, who will be under enormous pressure to stick to his pledge that tax rates on the richest Americans must go up. Indeed, it has been a great source of amusement to watch Republicans tie themselves in knots trying to come up with any solution or any proposal that will allow them to not have to vote on raising tax rates.

There is, of course, an easier solution to this problem: do nothing. Let the tax cuts expire on 1 January, with taxes going up on every American. Then, Congress can quickly pass a massive tax cut for those making less than $250,000, retroactive to 1 January. Neither side will want to wait long and force Americans to pay higher taxes, but especially Republicans won't – as they will likely be blamed if no deal is swiftly reached. To do so would mean that all sides are politically satisfied: President Obama can say he stuck to his word about raising taxes on rich Americans, and taxes will have gone up without Republicans having to cast a vote; and both parties can reap the political benefit and claim credit for having cut taxes for the middle class.

Now, granted, this won't solve all the challenges of the "fiscal cliff": there will still be the issue of automatic cuts to domestic and defense spending programs, an end to unemployment insurance for millions of Americans, changes to the Medicare program that will create lower reimbursement rates for providers, and a series of other tax cuts, like the current payroll tax cut, the Earned Income Tax Credit and the perennial issue of the alternative minimum tax cut.

While this is perhaps overly optimistic, all of these are problems that – while not easy to solve – present far less of a challenge than the tricky politics of tax policy.

Republicans may have to give a little on domestic spending and tax breaks for the working and middle class, in return for extending tax cuts for their corporate benefactors and more money back for the Pentagon. Democrats will likely have to make some concessions on Medicare spending, but almost certainly to the provider side, rather than in actual benefits to recipients. And when it comes to deficit reduction, once the upper-income Bush tax cuts have expired, then Washington has made a major dow-payment in reducing the deficit.

In the end, neither side has all that much to gain from dragging the fiscal cliff argument out. Now that President Obama has won re-election, and doing short-term damage to the economy is no longer in the political interests of Republicans, the outlines of a budget deal become that much easier to achieve. Moreover, all those House Republicans have to run for re-election in two years – and would prefer to do so in more optimal economic conditions, rather than in an economy undermined by growth-reducing austerity policies.

There were once good political reasons for Republicans to have a dalliance with economic calamity; no longer is that true. And it's worth remembering that in virtually every single showdown between Obama and the Republican Congress in his first term (from the tax cut showdown of 2010 and the budget battle of early 2011, to the debt limit negotiations in the summer of 2011 and finally the payroll tax confrontation in the beginning of 2012), it has been Republicans who have surrendered, with far less than half a loaf. In its brinkmanship, the GOP likes to dance right up to the edge; they are far less inclined to take the plunge.

Republicans and Democrats will eventually reach a deal on the fiscal cliff: it might come before 1 January, but the more likely scenario is that it will happen after the new year (or possibly, it will be agreed to before 1 January and be voted on after). But that deal will happen because it's pretty much in everyone's best interests for it to occur.